Companies face an increasing need for integration of, and collaboration among, their information and enterprise software systems and with their business partners. In many software system landscapes, application components are directly connected in a one-to-one relationship with other application components, and integration capabilities are hardwired into the application components. Under these conditions, upgrades, changes, or extensions to an information and enterprise software system is challenging and resource-intensive, and adversely affects collaborative sharing of information.
New electronic business collaboration typically demands connectivity among applications inside and outside of company boundaries. Networks such as the Internet provide opportunities for systems to communicate almost instantaneously with other systems or individuals. Business processes that once were restricted to intranets and their users are now moving to the Internet to become an effective composition of Web services. A Web service is a programmable, self-contained, self-describing, modular application that can be published, discovered or invoked through an open Internet standard.
Processes such as supply chain planning, sourcing, and demand forecasting are automated across enterprises and within regions, and might be implemented across systems with only marginal communication costs. To achieve this result, components from different vendors might be integrated into a consistent infrastructure. And, in order to achieve an integrated infrastructure, technical connectivity might be provided among the different components of the system.
While technical connectivity can be provided using open protocols and standards like the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and extensible markup language (XML), integration of a company's business applications and web services with other parties' software platforms requires a message communication protocol that defines message communication between enterprise system components, yet utilizes open and widely accepted standards for adaptation to new technology.